With each fight

            With each kill

            Jace was getting the sneaking suspicion that he misunderstood those emotions from his first battle.

            The part of Jace that wanted things to go back to normal was desperately hoping that when all of this was over, he would have nightmares and be terrified of what he was doing today.

            The part of Jace that was smiling, the part of him that was reveling in the rush and drinking in the life-or-death challenge, was desperately hoping that things would never change.

            Jace decided, quite rationally, to tuck these thoughts away.

            He wasn’t sure who he would be when this battle was done, but for now he decided to simply enjoy this new experience in all its glory.

            The MAC he had been chasing down for the last few minutes was having a harder and harder time evading him. Jace was slowly but surely turning the machine into a series of smoking holes with his laser rifle. It had pinpoint accuracy and, when he turned down the power-per-shot, the beam changed from being large enough to disintegrate the entire body of the enemy MAC to being small enough to delicately dismember it. Jace was enjoying the progressively distressed and desperate movements of the MAC as he hunted it down.

            Jace turned another corner, nearly on top of the retreating beast now.

            But instead of an injured and beaten enemy, he found the metal man using what little energy it had left to pounce onto Jace’s MAC.

            They both went down in a mess of metallic limbs.

            Two massive machines of war clawing at each other while they rolled around on the ground was almost comical. It became less comical when Jace noticed they’d rolled into one of the skyscrapers lining the street. The battered and near-broken machine was on top of Jace bringing its remaining fist down onto his cockpit over and over, shaking the world around him.

            The beating wasn’t the only thing that caused the shaking. Large chunks of the building were starting to fall down on top of them. The groaning metal of the steel supports turned to screeching and then horrifying cracking.

            Jace was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to panic, but his utter joy of such an outrageous fight compelled him to struggle on. When the enemy pulled back its fist for another strike, Jace flipped half a dozen switches and unleashed a volley of rockets housed in his shoulders. The explosion practically decapitated the MAC, ripping off everything above the upper torso in an explosive display of metal shards and sparking wires.

            A few more switches and nudges on the control stick activated the boosters on the left side of his machine, throwing him back into the street.

            Jace then had a perfect view of the sky disappearing above him. The skyscraper was tilting in and sending down a shower of glass and office supplies. He watched as the tower bit into the other skyscraper just across the street and tore its way down floor after floor until finally coming to a precarious rest.

            Jace moved as quick as he could to get out from under this new canopy. He was sure that, soon enough, both of these towers would fully collapse. The shelters under both buildings had activated their distress beacons. The shelter in the now tilted skyscraper was apparently inescapable and needed assistance. The other shelter went into an automatic lockdown due to the noxious smoke released from the burning half of the enemy MAC that had drifted too close to their ventilation systems.

            Jace ran a few quick diagnostics on his machine to make sure things weren’t too damaged yet. After getting the OK from the onboard computer he started making his way toward the last remaining enemy that had been spotted in the city.

            Saving the people in those shelters wasn’t a job for him, Jace realized. MACs were built for war after all.

            Most of the resupply points were now in ruins, the few that were still standing were on the other side of the city. Jace had wasted too much of the charge on his laser rifle and only had a few shots left at best. His main arm with the cannon didn’t have much ammo left either and, more worryingly, the barrel was visibly drooping from overheating and certainly no longer reliable.

            A handful of rocket and missile batteries and a few hundred shots for his shoulder mounted autocannons was all he was left with.

            But a giant metal monster can kill without weapons as long as you get close enough. Beating the enemy into submission with that main cannon shouldn’t prove to be too difficult. The main issue was actually the busted-up armor plating. Plenty of piping and tubing had been turned into mincemeat by this point. Complex internal mechanisms were suddenly assaulted by the smoke, flames, and debris of a crumbling city. The diagnostics screen showed fluid levels dropping at an abnormal pace. The white and grey chunks of armor were slowing being painted in streaks of black and rainbow-reflective fluid as the busted pipes spewed chemicals of all kinds out onto the machine.

            Jace kept one of his split fingers hovering over the button that would insert the cord into his head. He wasn’t sure if it would help, but he planned on using everything at his disposal to bury this next MAC.

            The marker on his map hadn’t moved in quite some time. Jace did a bit of digging in the system to pull up a defense emplacement map and overlay it. Two of the three paths the enemy could have taken to get to that spot were liberally coated with medium sized defense turrets. Jace had a renewed sense of elation as he realized his final fight would be between two busted up and crumbling machines.

            This, Jace knew, this would be a test of pure skill.

            Who would be the better pilot?

            Who would be the better fighter?

            Who would kill whom?

            Jace turned the corner and fired off both main weapons. The laser’s output was maxed out and the shot was wide enough to cover the whole four-lane street. The shell thrown out of his cannon went erratically off course, but the dust that was kicked up, when mixed with the suffocating smoke, made it impossible to see even a few meters.

            Even if the melted enemy beast could lash out with its dying breath it wouldn’t hit anything.

            But, Jace’s perfect plan had a fatal flaw, as tends to happen to those that make plans in the midst of their own bloodthirst. One of the maps Jace neglected to check would have shown him the status of watchtowers across the city. All of which were destroyed in this sector. The marker on the map was stationary due to it being the last known location, not due to the enemy being immobilized.

            Jace had no time to think these things through. Instead, the back of his machine was very nearly blown open, sending sharpened spears of torn machinery from the back to the front of the cockpit, completely destroying the monitors to Jace’s left and right. Only the reinforced ejection chair stopped the debris from skewering Jace and his main monitor.

            Jace’s MAC was thrown forward with all the force of a tempest and the compromised cockpit filled with the choking poison of the burning hellscape that was the city. A well-placed outstretched arm kept the cockpit from feeling the full force of the fall. Instead, the metal man was propped up on two knees and the arm that had now dropped the laser rifle.

            Jace’s mind was no longer his own. It started to operate without any real cogent thought. It simply moved in the ways that would ensure survival.

            It became the mind of a warrior.

            He detached the cannon arm and the sudden shift of weight rolled his MAC onto its back. It was still impossible to see anything, doubly so due to the streaks of blood that now poured down from his head. His machine had rolled right over the cannon, flattening it, but it was now sitting within easy reach of his remaining arm.

            His main monitor was now essentially useless. The eye-watering smoke had fully consumed his cockpit and rendered Jace virtually blind. He pressed the SOS button, and it did two things: it lit up his position with a distress beacon and it also blew out the frontal armor of the cockpit for an emergency escape or, more often, pilot corpse recovery.

            The smoke didn’t change, but now it was truly an endless sea in front of him. However, rather than smoke being the main worry, it was the heat that now assaulted Jace. Without the barrier of that frontal armor, the heat of the melting city poured directly onto Jace. He shut his eyes, but they still felt as if they were burning. His pilot suit did little to hold back the elements. If anything, it felt as if the specialized fabric was being welded onto his skin. Some small and distant part of Jace wondered if they would be able to get the suit off when they recovered his body.

            The rest of Jace was purely focused on one thing: sound. The enemy MAC had been slowly approaching but was obviously unsure of the state of Jace’s own machine. The movements were cautious. Well, as cautious as an eighty-ton weapon of war can be.

            The machine came to a sudden stop. To Jace, it seemed as if the whole world had frozen in time. Somehow the roaring flames and steady gas explosions faded into nothing more than background noise. Static. The only thing that mattered was the next sound from the approaching steel beast.

            The first step came down with much more force, literally shaking Jace in his seat, and the second step came soon after.

            It was running now.

            Charging forward like a wild animal set on finishing off its weakened prey.

            Jace, long ago, had heard of people going boar hunting. There was a technique where you would surround the boar’s habitat and wait for a comrade to scare it. When it came charging out, mad with rage and fear, you would plant the butt of your spear in the ground and let the boar impale itself.

            The barrel of the cannon, by some miracle, was sturdy enough to not simply bend or snap when the MAC came running into it. Instead, it punctured the cockpit of the machine, being pushed through the thick armor plating by the sheer weight and speed of the enemy.

            Jace held his breath for the explosion or the ultimate crushing weight as the enemy fell onto him, but it didn’t come.

            Jace’s consciousness faded as he heard the screeching of tires nearby.

            Days later, when the smoke had cleared and a recovery team was sent to attend to the MACs, they were greeted by a wretchedly beautiful monument. Two MACs that were little more than internal support frames and loosely hanging armor plates, with hoses and piping slithering out like snakes from a corpse, were frozen in time. Stalled in that final moment with one on its back holding a cannon-turned-makeshift spear and the other with two empty mechanical hands outstretched and desperately trying to reach the last few meters for a killing blow.

            To those that had never seen a battle between MACs before, it looked frighteningly animalistic. Not at all like the pirouettes and tour en l’airs that they had come to expect from the ballet-like dances against hypersonic missiles.

            This was savage and disgusting.

            And yet, the two MACs locked in such a violent scene still seemed to possess a beauty of their own.